[GUIDE] Warrior: Skill Intensive Tanking

[Exrage]

Second Wind is garbage, drop it for Mantra or Haymaker. Provoke is very situational, 90% of the time I will be 2nd on threat and keep myself there if its a 2 tank fight, even if I have to run off to do something else. If the fight has me dealing with adds 100% of the time and the MT goes down, then yes Provoke works for that fight.

A lot of tanks feel that way about Second Wind, for lowbies grinding Mantra should be one of the last things they concern themselves with and Haymaker's damage/enmity is more of a joke than a 600+ clutch heal.

As for provoke- again, for the new players it's a skill they already have and it can save a PUG were an MT goes down, or your healer smashes the wrong heal, or your DPS starts a bit early, or... point being for the new guys it's ideal until they find themselves in a consistent team where few "oh shit" moments occur and they're free to use cross-class skills that feed into their raid's rotations more than their own.

[Exrage]

So a couple questions have been asked about what's more important gear wise for a tank: Should you focus on rings/necklace/etc as they're cheaper or should you focus on saving for the main body pieces as they provide higher stats?

For the sake of simplicity I would say the first piece that offers both things is your belt, all the damage resistance of main body pieces at the cost of your stat pieces. The next piece I would consider is +1 on your relic as it increases your damage/enmity/healing, then worry about AF2 main body pieces as you gain allagan from the Coils until you have a mix of the two before focusing on the accessories.

Note that this is a VERY situational question based on your tank, your team (or many of you the PUG), and how quickly you progress.

[Exrage]

Marking:
Maelwys made an excellent post on page 3, since I tend to run with my FC mostly I don't need to bother with it but I do have a mouseover (<mo>) macro that uses attack/bind/ignore depending on what modifiers I wish (alt/shift/tab or L1/L2/L3) collecting dust.

Bleeds:
Vengeance is a great one to use but most use it for a Wrath clutch ability. I tend to lean more toward the latter as most of my combos revolve around boss abilities and it's nice giving the healers 40% of my HP self-healed if my buffer will allow.

Fracture is a bit of a dark horse, it will add a percent or three to your DPS and round out your enmity per TP (e/TP) but is another independent variable that must be juggled between your rotations and is easily forgotten with very little detriment to your overall tank in comparison to more pressing rotations for the healers/raid.

[Disrupter]

Provoke is required. There's no way around it and that will become clear in Coil if it isn't already.
Second Wind isn't as useful as a mitigation cooldown in most cases.
Haymaker is great, but doesn't hit very hard for a Warrior. Use it if you don't have a Slow in the group already.
Featherfoot is good.
Awareness might be good, but there are no encounters requiring it.
Flash is also good, as position requirements for Overpower cause you to lose time picking up mobs, which kills your group.

[Exrage]

It's been asked how you can manage the adds AND tank the Dreadnoughts on the final phases of the elevator, it's actually pretty simple: Right through the middle of the raid.

He'll automatically eat the bugs off the DPS/healers while they can focus on whittling him or the Soldier/Rook down, but ultimately it's far easier to have a Dragoon/Monk worry about the lesser HP mobs.

[Phreak]

It's been asked how you can manage the adds AND tank the Dreadnoughts on the final phases of the elevator, it's actually pretty simple: Right through the middle of the raid.

He'll automatically eat the bugs off the DPS/healers while they can focus on whittling him or the Soldier/Rook down, but ultimately it's far easier to have a Dragoon/Monk worry about the lesser HP mobs.

So run the dread through the raid group to get spiders so he can roto swipe the entire group? It's far easier just to ask your healers to stand behind the dread after it lands and have the bugs come to them after a medica spam or two.

[Exrage]

So run the dread through the raid group to get spiders so he can roto swipe the entire group? It's far easier just to ask your healers to stand behind the dread after it lands and have the bugs come to them after a medica spam or two.

Be careful not to troll, and as it appears you're unfamiliar with either the mechanics of the fight or the positioning of the adds during the final drop the reason that doesn't work is that Dreadnought comes from the previous encounter's positioning while the OT picks up the second and you rush to finish the first.

It's a common question I get with teams stuck on the 4th turn, hence my bringing it up in the guide for tanks trying to figure out how to bring a bit of order to the chaos in that fight while compensating for lesser DPS- they tend to be aware of the swipe and it's why they don't consider moving the boss to make it easier on the healers, who must focus on healing both tanks AND DPS now.

[Vortok]

My issue with macros was based on how I observed they worked, which may've been inaccurate or there might be a workaround I'm unaware of.

What I saw when using them though, is that they won't queue the ability if you hit it before the GCD is up. With a standard ability you can hit it half a second or so before the GCD finishes and it'll fire off the moment it's able to. With a macro, it seemed to require me to wait until the GCD was finished and then hit the ability, which just results in inferior dps/threat/whathaveyou.

Unless I was just observing it wrong or there's a way around it, I can't justify macroing commonly used attacks.

[Exrage]

snip

You're probably using the /wait to queue abilities, which you're absolutely correct in that they do not factor in skill speed and require various "animation cooldown" buffers per ability left intentionally by the developers to prevent the "one button spam" of GCD abilities.

When you simply list the abilities you are using code to tell the game what ability to use and in what order every time the macro button is pressed and nothing more. Abilities require the animation CD but it is essentially like pressing the buttons with you're fingers spaced with nano seconds between them, so long as they are not on CD they will fire in order every time without a hitch. See the "macro logic" post on the first page of the guide for more on this.

[Vortok]

You're probably using the /wait to queue abilities,

Wasn't using /wait. Tried 'em out while I was leveling Archer for Quelling Strikes. Here's the two I had.

/macroicon "Heavy Shot"
/ac "Misery's End" <t>
/ac "Heavy Shot" <t>
/ac "Bloodletter" <t>

/macroicon "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot" <t>
/ac "Internal Release"

They worked, activated their stuff and all that just fine. It was just that I couldn't spam either one as the GCD was finishing to make it use Heavy Shot or Straight Shot the instant the GCD was up. Had to let the GCD finish before it'd recognize me hitting the button for the next ability. They'd use the other stuff that's off the GCD just fine as well so it was functional at least. Took me a bit to notice it as at first it just felt like it was playing less smooth.

Might've just been doing something wrong. Just tried them again and had the same result. Even removed Internal Release to only have one action on the Straight Shot macro. Either it's macros in general or I need a different syntax.